Traditional optical character recognition (OCR) systems often tend to sacrifice speed in the interests of ensuring accuracy in character recognition. The traditional character recognition process typically incorporates a template to execute a character-by-character recognition of various characters. The template, which can be one of a number of different types of templates, is associated with a pattern-matching algorithm that identifies a specific numeral or a letter of an alphabet. Certain characters such as the numeral zero and the letter “O” are relatively similar to each other. Consequently, the process of using the pattern-matching algorithm tends to be slow in order to ensure that such characters are not misinterpreted. However, it is desirable to provide systems and methods that provide for faster optical character recognition without sacrificing accuracy.